cost of smart lighting. But Costello said the
energy pitch upfront won’t work.

Back to the subtitle of the talk, Costello
sees the danger as non-connected and sen-sor-less LED lighting being installed with a
likely lifetime in the 15-year range. He said,
“You are condemning these buildings to not
have an IoT framework.” Building owners
and facility managers will not be open to
again retrofitting that space with Io T capabilities for more than a decade.

Emerging applications

Of course, SSL will succeed in many more
applications outside of general lighting with
some already being penetrated, but with a
much larger potential in the future. Consider
disinfection in facilities from medical to athletic to daycare. Colleen Costello, president
and co-founder of Vital Vio, presented the
concept of lighting products that both produce functional illumination and disinfect
a space continuously (Fig. 6).

We have written previously about howultraviolet (UV) energy can sanitize a surfaceor water instantaneously. In fact, that con-cept was presented at SIL several years back( http://bit.ly/1k Xzh1e). But UV light can’t besafely used in an open building space wherehumans are present.

Vital Vio is using violet light that is notdangerous to the human eye and is below thewavelengths associated with a blue-light haz-ard for humans. But the pathogen-killing phe-nomenon is quite different from that associ-ated with UV. Costello said the technologytargets specific molecules in bacteria cells anddelivers an overload of oxygen that explodesthe cells. But such sanitation takes time.The Vital Vio approach is centered onFIG. 5. Joe Costello of Enlighted warned that installing SSL without intelligent sensorstoday may push back the evolution of smart buildings for a decade.